Wednesday, October 30, 2013

I recently came across these papers from 2000 and 2001 and 2006 demonstrating the neurological connections between music and language, suggesting the two were once one. I make the same argument in my 2004 dissertation, albeit, in ignorance of this article. I am happy to learn my conclusions had been confirmed. More, this confirms the neurological consilience that occurs when we hear rhythmic poetry.

Further, in the 2000 paper, Steven Brown observes that

music emphasizes sound as emotive meaning and language emphasizes sound as referential meaning.

One of the attractions of poetry is, of course, that it does both.

Coincidentally, the arguments in this short article about the biological paradoxes of music, is equally applicable to language, dance, storytelling, and poetry. So, too, his comments about musical autonomy in the West -- when something like music becomes its own spontaneous order, it continues to overlap with other social orders, but it also develops a pure core. The same is true of language, dance, storytelling and poetry -- we have self-referential language modern dance, metafiction, and self-referential poetry. Postmodern music, fiction, and poetry are a natural consequence of these artistic orders' full development as autonomous orders.

Friday, October 18, 2013

I am currently reading Gad Saad's The Consuming Instinct -- a book about applying the insights of evolutionary psychology to economics, but in which we can find a great deal on literature. Indeed, Saad's book is a very good source for those wishing to use the insights of evolutionary psychology to analyze literature.

For example, in discussing gossip, he uses soap operas and gossip magazines and T.V. shows as examples. Consider his observation that

In a content analysis of gripping stories, as reported on the front page of newspapers and spanning more than three hundred years and five continents (North America, Europe, Oceania, Asia, and Africa), many themes were manifestations of one of the four Darwinian meta-drives, including stories about courtships (mating), family dynamics (kin selection), human attacks (survival), and heroic acts of bravery (reciprocal altruism). The frequency rankings of the various types of headlined stories were invariant to cultural settings and to particular epochs. This suggests that the stories we most want to read are universally defined, as they are precisely those that have had great import in our evolutionary past. (167)

A few things to note in this passage. The four Darwinian meta-drives are not just the stories we seek out in newspapers -- they are the kinds of stories we create and seek out in our literature as well. Postmodernist complaints aside, hero stories aren't going anywhere.

Saad also points out that

Several content analyses of soap operas have uncovered recurring universal themes in this television genre including sexual infidelity (with the requisite paternity uncertainty), power struggles, sibling rivalries, parenting challenges, love and romance, bonds of friendships, and a wide range of interpersonal betrayals and deceptions, to name a few. All of these map quite clearly onto the Darwinian meta-pursuits discussed earlier. (167-8)

I suppose many literary analysts won't care to hear that soap operas and high literature share the same themes, but insofar as each are stories designed to keep the attention of human beings, such overlaps are to be expected. But it is what he says about gossip that really got my attention:

Gossip is a central facet of soap operas. The storylines within soap operas move forward in large part via the gossiping that takes place within the shows. (168)

This is true not only of soap operas, but I suspect of a great many dramas. The issue is certainly not that gossip hasn't been looked at in literature. It has. There are even books on it. But gossip in literature from an evolutionary psychological standpoint? Perhaps we need a little Robin Dunbar meets William Shakespeare.